Tuesday, February 23, 2010

This is a double sided sticky lightweight webbing so that I can iron on my applique and not have to worry about pinning it to the quilt top. It is great stuff. I highly recommend using this for your applique. You can find it at Walmart and JoAnne's.

Place a sheet of the webbing over the top of your applique. Draw a rough circle on the paper backing. Make sure your drawn circle is smaller than the fabric circle.

Remove one sides backing paper. Place the sticky side against the wrong side of your fabric circle. Then iron away; make sure your iron is hot. It may take a couple of swipes of the iron to get the webbing to melt. The backing paper begins to look more transparent when this happens. Lift up an edge of the backing paper. If the webbing comes away from the fabric, you need to iron longer.

Here is what the webbing looks like after taking off the backing paper. Take your time getting the paper off. Sometimes it sticks to the webbing :)

Place your fabric circle on your quilt top. I am sewing the applique pieces to the top before I make the quilt sandwich. You could wait to add them until after you add the quilting too. But I wanted the quilting to go over my applique pieces.

Iron the fabric in place. The webbing will now stick the fabric circle to the quilt top. Look ma, no pins!

Now you are going to want to choose a coordinating thread for stitching down the circle. I wanted an outlined look for my circles, so I chose a dark brown. You can also chose a thread that coordinates better with your fabric so it blends in better. The choice is yours.

You will be using a zig-zag stitch to sew the circle in place. Above is what your zig-zag stitch should look like. The one side should just barely hit the outside of the circle. Take your time moving the fabric through your machine making small adjustments to follow the curve. I set my stitch length to 1, but you should use a scrap piece of fabric to figure out how long you want you stitch to be. You will not want it to long, but you also do not want it piled on top of each other.

You can backstitch at the beginning and end to secure the stitches. After completing my stitches all the way around the circle, I buried my threads through to the back of the quilt top. I also tied the top and bottom threads in small knots just to be on the safe side once they were together on the back.

Here is what the whole first row and border look like with the appliqued circle applied.

That is it! Repeat these steps for all of you applique circles. When you get to the ones that overlap, one completely on top of the other, just adhere the smaller one first to the larger circle. Then adhere the larger circle to the quilt top. I believe there is one of these between rows 3 and 4.

To complete you quilt, follow the wonderful quilting and binding instructions provided by Dana over on Old Red Barn.